Conclusion

We hope that after reading this article you understand how NVIDIA achieves anti-aliasing by using existing hardware features in a different way. You also should have a better idea how the various D3D FSAA settings in the 5.22 beta drivers select different over-sampling rates, MIP Map Detail Levels, and filtering options. Finally, you should have a better understanding of what these settings mean in terms of video memory use.

It is important to remember that the current 5.22 drivers are not final or official. They are unofficial beta drivers. Because of this, they do not represent the final quality, performance, nor compatibility of NVIDIA's anti-aliasing. However, this does not mean these drivers aren't worth using or investigating. It simply means that things can get better, and this is generally true for all drivers from all 3D accelerators. So keep that in mind.

Overall, we have to congratulate NVIDIA for offering so many different settings, each with its own quality/speed ratio. We do have to note that many of the high-quality settings will be unavailable on the mainstream 32MB boards at any but the lowest screen resolutions. Future benchmarks and image quality comparisons will tell us where the true sweet point is in terms of playability and image quality.